I love small open worlds, it is perhaps my favorite sub-genre or whatever, but Alba felt like a big level more than a small world. Too guided and not alive enough, which is a huge problem given the subject matter. The idea of a small spanish island where the main thing is to clean it and take animal pictures is super sweet, but the execution here is extremely bland, with an uninspired level design and not much happening around it. The characters felt fake as well, the flavor text actually read like it was flavor text, and the rest of the writing wasn’t that much better either.

Not as insane as everybody says, there’s two segments that are clearly the star of the show when it comes to big set-pieces and the rest is… forgettable, really, it also feels extremely constrained by the limitations of an ancient hardware, the developer unable to reach the visual splendor they surely imagined. As a shooter merely one year before Halo, I’m sad to admit that this does not hold up, and as an art-piece, while not without its charm, is as juvenile as it gets, full of half-assed ideas and not much more, like they watched the end of evangelion and wanted to make something like that in game form but didn’t have the time nor the money so this is the result.

Broken ass game from nearly 10 years ago with two awful main modes that require microtransactions to work and with another game mode that asks you to spend several hours (mygm) before letting you do the cool shit that you actually want to do and that is plagued with stupid fucking incessant micromanaging garbage like talking to your players to keep their morale up or whatever. Most of the money seems to go to the fucking mycareer cutscenes that most people either don’t care about or actively hates. Every little thing they tried to do to make the game cool and hip is boomer nonsense that messes with the actually cool things of a basketball games, it just gets in the way between the player and a decent sport simulation. The engine is slow as shit and now you can’t even TAKE FUCKING JUMPSHOTS because the margin of error is so slim that you have to actually like get the timing down to a frame BUT EVERY PLAYER IN THE GAME HAS A DIFFERENT ANIMATION AND A DIFFERENT TIMING SO IT IS SEEMINGLY ONLY OPTIMIZED TO BE FUN IN A COMPETITIVE MYPLAYER MODE BUT BREAKS THE REST OF THE FUCKING GAME AND YOU CANNOT CHANGE THIS WHY WOULD THEY DO THIS STUPID ASS SHIT I DON’T UNDERSTAND PLEASE SOMEBODY TELL ME!!!

Very late on my save I found this southern coastal village all by myself, almost by accident really, just messing around in an area I had barely touched for some reason (most landmarks happen to be up north). I was genuinely thrilled about it. It felt like I wasn’t guided there at all… because I wasn’t! I just explored this beautiful world with no motivation but my own curiosity, and was thoroughly surprised by a game I had played more than 50 hours. I felt that place alive and huge and real.

And then I talked to the people there and felt a sudden disappointment. None of them told me anything, whatever made the world feel real doesn’t extend to the actual people you meet nor the stories they tell you. The (frankly) abysmal writing just isn’t at odds with the excellent world design, and how sweet it feels to discover it. I can’t help to remember, let’s say, Deadfire, where the worse secondary objectives are at least decent, like at least try to tell you something funny or cool or curious. Breath of the Wild pales in comparison.

This is an excellent game that gets worse the more you play it.

PS. Stop putting bosses with invincibility phases on good games, I’m begging you.

You go to face the monster.

The monster is too fast and strong for you and defeats you effortlessly.

You fight it a few more times and you start learning its patterns, getting familiar with its moves, anticipating to its attacks.

Suddenly, almost by mistake, you kill it at the last second, the mission, what brought you to its lair, is accomplished.

But you come back.

Now you kill its brothers and sisters, each time faster than the last.

You become so accustomed to its kind that they are not even nuisances in your path, your weapon designed specifically to hurt them, your clothing made from their corpses.

You are no longer the prey. You are the hunter.

Pretty much a perfect game, I’m extremely surprised this even runs on the NES. And not only that, like, this game is kinda gorgeous, and full of very charming sprite work. The type of thing people can come back to every once in a while and not only for nostalgia reasons, it is also cool to play this, and there is an amazing variety of abilities that constantly changes the way you play. The controls aren’t perfect but damn it they are not that far either.

People seem to love this music and I frankly didn’t see why. But the biggest negative is by far the final boss. You know the drill; much harder that the rest of the game and invincible for large periods. I would fight to death to whomever came up with this. Seriously.

Incredibly stylish and cool hack and slash that exudes extravaganza in every component of its design. Pretty much every graphic designer likes this game, and that's for a reason, as everything looks and feels outlandish and over the top in the best possible way. I also really like the core game design of a typical Hideki Kamiya game where you have a short, conclusive and enjoyable main campaign where the extra juice is replaying the levels and doing it better, faster, taking more risks and knowing where to look for the extra levels. I even liked the gimmicky boss fights, as they're a spectacle, which is the objective, but the gimmicky levels are a chore at best and an absolute disgrace at worse. Sadly, the first playthrough is potentially the worst one, because that's when you're more likely to call bullshit on the timing of some enemies (a few are trial and error) and watch the nearly THREE HOURS of cinematics that depict an extremely convoluted and uninteresting plot, with mediocre action sequences that don't hold a candle to the bonkers fights you can actually do while playing the game.

Some people say this has great writing, which is a little funny to me because the story is all over the place, trying extremely hard to be serious and imitating a particular type of plot that is clearly not equiped to do, not to mention a lore that I cannot imagine someone liking. The idea of having different routes is fine and makes sense from a mechanics perspective, but the pacing is atrocius as basically half the game is an introduction, and all the systems with which you interact with the characters aren’t as enjoyable to do them twice, let alone three or even four times. Any additional playthrough will have you spending at least five hours of repetitive chores and that is a crime for a game that basically begs you to replay it. The other part of the writing has no right being as good as it is; the characters. At the beginning I honestly thougth they were written by the programing department, a messy cast you can give cool perks in combat that sort of relate to their personalities, but as you advance they reveal all their personal trauma and funny querks, which I found extremely endeering. It is probably the best part of the game. The combat is good, but not excellent; I’m missing the regular rock-paper-scisors dynamic of weapons of other games in the series, or something similar. The maps are mediocre and lack some variety, and the unit specialization system is complex but in my opinion not tremendously well implemented. The graphics are merely acceptable and the performance is poor to say the least.